“Everything has mind in the lead, has mind in the forefront, is made by the mind,” the Buddha said 2,500 years ago. I return to this phrase of the great teacher Gautama because it is key to understanding our relationship to what we consider real. It is also the bedrock of the therapeutic approach I take to my work and, when I’m conscious, to my personal path. With our minds we construct the world we live in: this is the core teaching. The contribution of modern psychology and neuroscience has been to show how, before our minds can create the world, the world creates our minds. We then generate our world from the mind our world instilled in us before we had any choice in the matter. The world into which we were born, of course, was partly the product of other people’s minds, a causal daisy chain dating back forever.
This may sound grim. Yet the Buddha’s dictum offers a way out, since we remain the ones creating the world we see, the world we think is real, in every moment. And here is where healing comes in. We can do nothing about the world that created our mind, that may have instilled in us limiting, harmful, untrue beliefs about ourselves and others. However — and here’s the good news I alluded to — we can learn to be responsible for the mind with which we create our world moving forward. The capacity to heal is born of the willingness to do just that, to take on that responsibility. Such willingness is not a once-and-for-all declaration but a moment-by-moment commitment, one that can be regenerated when we lose touch with it. I, for one, have to keep reminding myself to do so. Nor is it an invitation to self-imposed naïveté or blithe so-called positive thinking. It is about the willingness to reconsider our entire view.
Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture
